It’s a drizzly afternoon, and garden facilitator Michael Covey is kneeling in the grass, picking a few stray dead leaves off beet plants.

These beets were grown in the school garden, and they’re about to be delivered to the River City Food Bank, along with some spinach and lettuce.

He scoops up the beets and carries them to where senior Rio Liu, a student garden volunteer, is sorting through some lettuce.

She and Covey were out in the garden early in the morning to harvest the lettuce. If they had waited, the sun could have warmed the plants, causing the sap to run up from the roots and into the leaves of the lettuce, making it bitter, Covey said.

At the beginning of the year, Liu knew nothing about lettuce and when to harvest it. That’s because she had never gardened before, she said.

Then she signed up for the community service elective and found that the garden needed a volunteer. So she’s been working there every other day since the beginning of school.

She’s preparing the veggies to be delivered, and now she and Covey have encountered another problem. Some of the lettuce has suffered freezer damage because the MP room refrigerator, where he stored it, was set too cold.

Liu is visibly frustrated with this setback. Some of the damaged heads have to be thrown in the compost.

“That’s so sad,” she says.

Liu has been in charge of the beds devoted to the food bank since school started.

Although she was nervous to start gardening, she said “Dr. Covey is really nice” and has taught her a lot.

She enjoys planting seeds and watering the most.

“To see the seeds you planted before coming up and becoming vegetables, that’s pretty exciting,” she said.

Next Covey and Liu bag the spinach and add those bags to the plastic bins full of spinach and beets.

Then it’s off to parking spot 11, where the school’s white Suburban is parked.

Covey and Rio load the bins into the trunk and hop in the car.

The last time he delivered, Covey had a hard time parking. This week he vows to do a better parking job, he says with a laugh.

The Country Day garden donations began when substitute teacher Barbara Edwards started to take some of the leftover harvest to the food bank, where she volunteers, according to Covey.

“And when I heard about this,” Covey said, “I said, ‘Well, we should start beds dedicated to the food bank.”

SCDS has been providing the food bank with fresh produce for the past three or four years, Covey said.